Random thoughts on my hobbies (miniatures gaming, hiking, geocaching), family, literature, music and whatever else occurs to me. My Wife graciously suggested a blog name of Eric's Dork-o-rama, but that sounded less dignified somehow...true though it may be.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Runestones and Pools

A post on a couple of the small projects I have in the works.

First, some old and crumbling rune-carved pillars. These could be found above ground or below, and I do not have any specific plan in mind for them. Pillars are carved from foam and painted gray. A dull pencil is then used to etch runes lightly into the surface. The recessed etchings are then "painted" with a black Sharpie. After the rest of the basing is done, (piles of rubble, glued and then painted) a final dry brush highlight of light gray will be applied. I applied the highlight to the top surface of the one piece lying down just to see the final effect. All the rocks, whether on the rune pieces or the little pieces of scatter terrain by themselves, will be painted black, and then successively dry brushed with shades of gray.

Rune carved pillars - in process

For more complex areas of smaller caverns and passages, I have another set of modular pieces. These can be laid out as the adventurers explore. Making these kind of cave warrens in the way detailed in the prior post would be difficult. I would call this method a "positive space" way of doing it. Passages and caverns shown are hollow spots in the ground, everything else is solid. This is the same method I used for my linear dungeon pieces (squares, rectangles and regular hallways). [Which started all this, and which I will show sometime soon]

Caverns and passages - "Positive" Space

I saw a YouTube crafter's video recently about making recessed pool areas in foam pieces using nail polish (Black Magic Craft I believe it was). The chemicals in the nail polish melt the foam a little bit, before the melting stops. Judicious use of the polish gives you a controlled melt, which can then be painted and filled in (blues for water, oranges for lava pools, green for slime, brown for mud, etc).

Testing the nail polish melt method

To add cavern pieces of interest, I am going to make some that have pools of various kinds. The first such piece is shown below. Nail polish has melted three areas, which have subsequently been painted black. The rest of the painting will be done later. They will be water pools on this piece. After the painting is done, a bit of clear two part resin epoxy (like Envirotex) will be used to fill the pools.

Cavern piece with pool areas

And a close up of the larger of the melted pool areas. This is a nice technique that will have lots of uses in a fantasy world terrain set.

Nail polish melted pools

I will post pictures of the finished pieces, but that will likely be next weekend at the earliest.

In the meantime, I may be able to get some photos up of the dungeon terrain.